Humphrey is right in stressing the importance of child and adolescent mental health. Mental disorders commonly emerge during adolescence and can persist into adulthood with adverse consequences for adult mental health, social outcomes and economic productivity (Patton et al., 2014). It is important to add how important it is to prevent and to treat such disorders. Recent longitudinal research has found that not all mental health disorders in adolescence persist into adulthood, especially where episodes are shortened, for example by treatment (Copeland et al., 2011; Patton et al., 2014). These insights have added to calls for early, accessible and properly resourced clinical and public mental health interventions focused on the needs of children and adolescents (McGorry et al., 2013). Humphrey is also right to argue that the crisis in child and adolescent mental health is real rather than merely a product of changes in reporting. The evidence that Humphrey cites of increasing prevalence of internalising problems (Bor et al., 2014), anxiety (Fink et al., 2015) and distress (Lessof et al., 2016), as well as decreased wellbeing (Children's Society, 2017) among girls but not boys during this century supports this argument, as does the fact that reported wellbeing was subject first to an upswing and then to a downturn in recent decades (Children's Society, 2017). Humphrey makes a strong case that the accountability framework within which schools in England operate is likely to be harming child and adolescent mental health. Public sector school systems in several countries including England and the United States are increasingly subjecting students to 'highstakes' testing, with government using the results of these tests to manage the performance of schools. Harms to mental health might occur both because the overwhelming focus on improving attainment can displace work that schools might otherwise do to promote children's holistic development and wellbeing. However, it is also important to consider the evidence which suggests that schools in which students do better educationally than would be predicted by their sociodemographic characteristics also report better student health outcomes, including lower rates of substance use and violence (Bonell et al., 2013) both of which are risk factors for poor mental health. The question is how to ensure schools succeed in what will inevitably be their core business of promoting educational attainment while also promoting and not harming young people's mental and physical health. The potentially harmful effects of educational performance management might be partly mitigated by ensuring lessons do not become dominated by mock tests and that feedback from teachers focuses on constructive advice for improvement rather than merely quantitative summative grades. But, more ambitiously, the need to make the case that actively promoting mental health will actually help schools to achieve their core business of educating students. [For the original article, "Are the Kids Alright? Examining the Intersection between Education and Mental Health," by Neil Humphrey, see EJ1247696.]